The guiding element in the project to renovate the buildings of Queen Mary University in London, was the desire to pay tribute to the great British mathematician, Sir Roger Penrose. The university is one of the greatest institutions in the United Kingdom and is also home to a world famous mathematics and astronomy research centre.
Aliva worked with the architectural firm Wilkinson Eyre from the early planning stages, assisting with the development of a façade that has a strong visual impact, able to create the illusion of movement and the endless repetition of the Penrose pattern, interpreting his philosophy: “impossibility in its purest form”.
The Aliva structure used is the Ali-Glass concealed system, and the facing is rhomboidal shaped laminated glass, with a length of 120 cm: the inner layer is 10 mm thick, enamelled in three different colours, the outer one, which is screen printed, is 6 mm thick; in between is a transparent SGP interlayer of 1.52 mm. The sheets have two different rhomboidal shapes that, when inclined towards each other, recreate the articulated mathematical pattern that is also depicted in the screen printing on the intermediate glass that graphically represents a subset of the Penrose pattern in the lower scale.
In addition to the ventilated façade, Aliva constructed the curtain walls of the transparent areas for access to the campus using tailored structures and large insulating dual glazed units having varying inclinations, screen printed with the pattern as a continuation and integration of the opaque ventilated façade.
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